I’ve been hearing that many people do not like the new privacy policies and settings for Facebook that were announced in early December, but my account was recently hacked so I’m open to taking a look at the new settings. Facebook now has 350 million users and its team is working to improve its privacy.

According to Facebook’s Privacy Policy, there are four major things you need to know.

#1: You decide how much information you want to share out there. You can control it through the privacy settings. Review the default settings and make sure it’s where you want it.

#2: Take a look at your application settings. You have the ability to control how you share information with third-party applications and websites. You can limit how your friends share your information with applications.

#3: Certain categories of information (your name, profile photo, friend, networks, etc.)  are publicly available to anyone. But you can limit the ability of others to find that information.

#4: Facebook also wants you to know that they will not share your information with its advertisers.

Now here is some information on the criticism about the changes. Some are saying the new settings are pushing users to share even more information, according to the article on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website. They say the information that you used to have control of is now even more available to the public and you can’t opt out of sharing your information with Facebook apps.

CNN Tech recently posted an article about the changes and discussed some of the complaints that are rolling in. The option of restricting your “publicly available information” (your name, picture, networks etc.) is now gone. Your list of friends can now be viewed by all. The article says that Facebook argues that a user’s friend list can be made nonviewable, but either all or no one can see it. Another concern is the use of all of those quizzes we take that are developed by third parties. Now, when a friend adds an application your public information can now be viewed by these third parties.

I suggest taking a look at the Facebook policy and form your own opinion about the new privacy settings. I was just going to ignore it and keep it the way I had it before, but now I plan to carefully take a look and see if I need to make any changes to my account.